Let's Go Boating!

“I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.”
- Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

A few decades ago, aspiring young filmmaker Dewey Thompson made a short film that would come to define the trajectory of his future in New York City. The film, created as his graduate thesis project while an MFA student at Columbia, depicted an awkward first date between two young New Yorkers who wind up swept out to sea during an ill-fated outing on the East River.

“The film was sort of joke about a singles’ event, but as a result, I wound up owning this canoe,” Thompson explains. “I guess I made a film, and fell in love with one of the props.”

A sympathetic neighbor, Adam Perlmutter, helped out with storage space. “He had a cellar; you could just slide a canoe into it. It had a dirt floor, but it was within walking distance of our launch on Huron street, and we could use it … so it worked!” recalls Thompson.

Having grown up an ardent paddler (he cites formative experiences at Kamp Kangaroo in Australia), Thompson’s windfall soon blossomed into something of an obsession, as he and his wife began exploring the waterways surrounding their Greenpoint home. What they discovered was a magical world, carved out from the concrete and glass of New York City, full of space, solitude, and a rare connection to nature -- albeit a bedraggled one. “One thing I loved about it,” Thompson recalls, “is you are literally off the grid. You go where you want, make your own way.”

It was around the same time that Thompson, a longtime neighborhood activist with community organizations such as the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Youth Soccer League and GWAPP, grew aware of larger forces afoot in North Brooklyn brought about by the City’s 2005 rezoning. “I realized as it [the rezoning] took hold, that when developers talked about 'waterfront access' they meant looking at the water from behind a railing along an esplanade, and if we were going to actually preserve a way to get on the water itself, we had to have an organization that advocated for boating."

Thus, in 2010 was born the North Brooklyn Boat Club (NBBC). Part social club, part sports society, and all volunteer all the time, the club has, in the eight short years since it’s birth, grown by leaps and bounds to comprise some 300 dues-paying members staging dozens of monthly paddles in the club’s collectively owned flotilla of kayaks and canoes, all out of their attractive Newtown Creekside headquarters alongside the Pulaski Bridge.

With a mission to advocate for “human-powered boating on the waterways bordering Greenpoint/Williamsburg” the NBBC stages members-only outings and free public paddles (on Saturdays; check their website) throughout New York’s phenomenal estuary, ranging from simple sunset paddles in the East River, to birdwatching jaunts on Newtown Creek, to their legendary nocturnal circumnavigation of Manhattan, fearsomely described by resident paddler Klaus Rosburg as, “an all night event, leaving at nine, returning at dawn.”

Members must demonstrate facility with the various watercraft — training is provided gratis — and safety is paramount. Once a member achieves “Official Paddler” status, they are eligible to take kayaks and canoes out on their own, to meander the waterways of New York. Open year-round, the bulk of activity occurs between Memorial Day and Labor day, as the club hosts dozens of weekly group paddles and longer trips.

A corollary result of all this boating activity is the accumulation of a significant body of vital knowledge about the waters themselves. For a place so rigorously defined by water, North Brooklyn — to say nothing of the rest of the city — is infamously cut off from its own waterfront. As proud resident of a real-estate parcel allowing direct access to Newtown Creek (many thanks to Broadway Stages, which owns the land and allows the club access free of charge), the club is in a commanding position to act as a citizen-science juggernaut, and it is in its educative capacities that the NBBC most clearly stakes a claim on the future.

Under the leadership of club members Patterson Beckwith, Willis Elkins and others, the NBBC’s educational and environmental initiatives engage all manner of local schools, colleges, and other youth groups to engage a new generation of kids with the waters that surround us. Floating classrooms, hosted in the club’s 25-foot-long super-canoes, get kids as young as 5 out onto the water to learn the tactile lessons of the harbor, while collaboration with local stewardship and environmental watchdog orgs such as the Hudson River Foundation and the Newtown Creek Alliance provide more in-depth opportunities for engagement, such as an ongoing Water Quality Testing program staged in collaboration with LaGuardia College. A dedicated container (dubbed the “ed shed”) warehouses a host of educational resources, including a kid-friendly living aquarium containing a host of creek critters, as well as the club’s celebrated “Sewer in a Suitcase.”

Yet, the club is far more than just a sporting outlet and educational aggregator. The appeal of launching oneself into the admittedly polluted waters of Newtown Creek, bound for the scenic wonderlands of New York’s crumbling, forbidding waterfront is an esoteric one. Club members tend towards the obsessive, and the NBBC is, above all, a social nexus, with members finding in one another some sort of tribal, DNA-driven reflection. A few moments in the company of these boaters reveals a kinship that runs deep, and a camaraderie worthy of Patton’s army.

The whole picture, as it comes into focus, is of a unique New York society, born of singular obsessions, yet — as with all of Gotham’s greatest titillations — culturally infectious. And busy: As I visited this past Wednesday, a paddle was just setting off, led by the aforementioned Klaus (who holds a more-than-passing physical and characterological resemblance to Thor Heyerdahl), and joined by a half-dozen club members. As they lowered their kayaks into the murky waters of the creek, Paterson showed up to feed the plankton in the Ed Shed and do some pre-production for an upcoming Solstice Party this coming Saturday (see below), while Thompson fussed about, inspecting boats and checking in with other interlopers. A glance at the calendar showed a wine-and-cheese event planned for later in the evening.

All this activity puts some strain on the existing resources of the club, cobbled together as it is from some castoff shipping crates and scavenged lumber. Fortunately, an expansion is on the horizon: With a grant from the Newtown Creek Environmental Fund (administered by NYSDEC and City Parks Foundation), NBBC is drawing up plans for a three-story boat house on their current digs. And if their success shows signs of changing its physical manifestation, the club's ethos appears stubbornly and gloriously intact.

All of which confirms that the NBBC is more than a mere collection of boating enthusiasts. If the promise of city life is to allow the lonely idiosyncrasies of the human experience to find resonance with our fellow citizens, than the North Brooklyn Boat Club surely fulfills this promise. As a the world’s pre-eminent warehouse of individual obsessions (pacé, Tokyo), New York has long nurtured cultures and activities that live as secret societies, interspersed among — and countermanding — the more obvious and oppressive demands of the city’s better-known obsessions with money, ambition, power, and achievement. Like a tidal pool, this small enclave in North Brooklyn is busy evolving new adaptations to city life, bringing forth a new species of urban naturalist. The Club may be largely an imagined community in a changing city, but the narrative that informs it, and the stories it gives rise to, will continue to flow ever more freely and attract new life — just like the water it embraces.

The Public is welcome to join the North Brooklyn Boat Club for their annual Solstice Celebration this Saturday, June 23, at 6pm. Admission is $5, all proceeds benefit the boat club.